Google Referrals was recently "retired", to use the corporate BS for it, which means an end to the Firefox with Google Toolbar referrals and Google Pack referrals which had been earning me a pretty solid £50/day for as long as I can remember. That's a pretty nasty kick in the shins, but what ho, there's a credit crunch on don't you know and at least now I can empathise a little better with those feeling the pinch.

So, with no decent alternatives, I switched over to the Spread Firefox Affiliate Program. I got going mid week, and based on past seven day figures, I'm ranked in the top 15 and I think I could make it into the top referees over a full week's data. Now, you don't get any payment back from Spread Firefox for your efforts. I understand that - Firefox is free after all, and has always had a good community vibe about it, so to many it might seem a bit vulgar to be sloshing cash about in exchange for a recommendation. I understand that many people in fact chose not to use the Google Adsense Referral links and opted to just refer free of charge because they love the product. You do get points though, which put you on a leaderboard and on that leaderboard your username can be a link back to your site.

That's fair enough I guess: you give them loads of referrals, they give you a link back. This is community spirit in action, I thought, and in the absence of any money, a very nice PR back link would suffice. Except those folks over at sFX decided to add the NoFollow attribute to the links. Ah, what happened to the community spirit, guys! Someone actually took a conscious decision to deny affiliates the default benefit of a hyperlink, by adding this parameter which actively makes the link no good at all. That's a bit of a slap in the face for the "affiliates" I'd say, and is all the more strange when you notice that the links they provide for banners etc back to them don't include this NoFollow attribute which is a little inconsistent.

It's a bit like a friend giving you a donut/doughnut after they've just taken the jam out of it. You might still eat the thing, but you'd be entitled to wonder why a friend would think to take the jam out to make it less enjoyable than it was designed to be!?

Now I think this is a pretty rum deal but even after all that, I have no problems accepting its their browser and their program and they can do whatever they like. But I'm just left wondering... what's the actual point of the "affiliate program". Why even term it an affiliate program when you're not only not rewarding affiliates, but you're almost offending them by adding something specifically to render their backlink less useful than its default form would make it. So why not just scrap the "affiliate" program and just have links and banners for those want to use them, and I probably still would, but without the pretence that there's an affiliate scheme to speak of.

Labels: firefox